What does your business do when its systems stop working for a week? The VPRO documentary De week dat niks meer werkt (The week nothing works) plays out that question for the whole of Europe. We recommend it, above all for the way of thinking: start at the moment everything stops and reason back to today.
What the documentary is about
De week dat niks meer werkt is a 35-minute special, in Dutch, by the VPRO programme Bureau Buitenland. Journalist Sophie Derkzen and Ot van Daalen, lawyer and expert in privacy and cybersecurity, explore a scenario in which a large part of our digital systems fails within one week, from the power supply to payments.
Three threads run through that scenario:
- It starts small. Separate failures pile up, until cars stand still and essential services are disrupted.
- The cause lies outside Europe. The United States and China are competing for control over AI. Europe relies on technology from both, and either of them can restrict access to software or updates.
- After 72 hours the emergency kit runs out. How do you carry on if the failures are still there?
Those who speak include European Commissioner Henna Virkkunen, Haroon Sheikh of the WRR and Xiaoxue Martin of Clingendael.
Why we recommend it
The documentary is about countries and great powers. The question underneath is smaller and closer to home: how much influence do you have over the systems you depend on completely? That question applies just as much to a business of fifty people.
Most organisations know their systems. They know their dependencies less well. The ERP runs with one party, the mail with another, and recently part of the work has started to lean on an AI assistant. Every part works, until one drops out and you find out what was attached to it.
A scenario makes that visible without anything having to break. You start at the end, the week it does not work, and walk back. That is also how we analyse a process: first the end, then the road towards it.
Play it out for your own business
Take an hour with the people who do the work. Pick one system you rely on every day and assume it is gone on Monday morning, for a week.
- What stops first? Follow the chain from order to payment.
- What still works? Think of an export, a list on paper or phone numbers that are not only in the cloud.
- Who decides, and how do you reach each other? Without mail and chat that is not a detail.
- How do you get back? When was the backup last actually restored, and how long did that take?
Write down what you could not answer. That list is your backlog.
Do not forget AI. The digital emergency kit that VPRO released alongside the documentary contains a local AI model, next to an offline map and an offline Wikipedia. If you hand work to an AI assistant, you should know what is left undone when that assistant is unreachable for a week.
How we do it ourselves
We ask ourselves these questions too.
- Once a year we take a real outage as an exercise. Around the table we walk through the whole chain: who notices, who takes the lead, who calls the customer and how we recover.
- Our knowledge lives in plain text files. Our AI assistants work with them, and without AI we can read them just as well.
- No lock-in. Data, configuration and custom work remain the customer's.
Newway is certified to ISO 27001 and NEN 7510. How we work with that is described on our page about information security.
Watch
The documentary has been on NPO Start since 8 November and airs on NPO 2 on Thursday 7 January at 20:30. You put together the digital emergency kit from VPRO yourself.
What you can do with this
Want to walk through this scenario once for your own systems? Plan an introduction: half an hour, no sales pitch, but an honest answer to the question where to begin.
Written in response to the documentary De week dat niks meer werkt by VPRO Bureau Buitenland.
